'How Is His/Her Mood': A Question That a Companion Robot May Be Able to Answer

摘要

Mood, as one of the human affects, plays a vital role in human-human interaction, especially due to its long lasting effects. In this paper, we introduce an approach in which a companion robot, capable of mood detection, is employed to detect and report the mood state of a person to his/her partner to make him/her prepared for upcoming encounters. Such a companion robot may be used at home or at work which would be able to improve the interaction experience for couples, partners, family members, etc. We have implemented the proposed approach using a vision-based method for mood detection. The approach has been tested by an experiment and a follow up study. Descriptive and statistical analysis were performed to analyze the gathered data. The results show that this type of information can have positive impact on interaction of partners.